Discussion of an Off Topic forum can be traced to as far back as this point. When proposed by a member(now unknown), Stosh informed him that Sketch had begun to think about the creation of an Off-Topic forum. Members had called for it because of the spam and off-topic threads that had become so common in other forums, especially The Underground. Sketch predicted that if this off-topic forum did materialize that it would "turn into a spam pit the likes of which no website has ever seen before." Also, the phrase "spam pit" seems to have originated from this thread. There will never be another thread like Laser Wars.
The exact start and end points of this even are not known because of how widely spread the phenomenon is. It was at one point a pinned topic, and then it spread into it's own group and countless other threads. Laser wars was simply a forum game based on building armies and fighting other players. It's popularity was massive, greater than any other singular trend in forum history.
During this point in time The Flood experienced a wealth of talented writers, as well as a fanbase that was will to read more than 4 paragraphs in a single post. Among the Floodian writers that it would produce were Douglas Brown, Sniper McGee, bacon greese1521, Mabian, Commander Locks, Tartan 118, GameJunkieJim(Yes, the moderator), Colonel Corbec, and the Laureate of The Flood, Halifax. Multiple members would write for years, and even create fan groups, to themselves which became quite popular. Halifax is easily the most voluminous writer of them all at this point, even after many of his works were lost on Day After Bungie Day. There was even a point in time where writers were treated like rock stars when they announced that they were going to do a story. However, many like Sniper McGee and squirrel dude only got through the first couple of chapters and then simply didn't have the energy to continue with their work. The Golden Age is marked at ending on 10/26/2008, when Halifax posted his final story, but it had been falling off long before that. Although Mabian was writing a very popular story called The Floodiad, many other authors were no longer receiving the attention they used to, the attention that was often the reason for their writing. This, combined with a resurgence of The Gallery forum has limited Floodian forum fiction since.
In the summer of 2005, the forum Zanzibar tried to blitzkrieg the Flood Forum by flaming and spamming the forum into submission. The resulted in a full-out flame war. Floodians started flaming and spamming the forum Zanzibar in retaliation, until late in 2005. The Flood halted the flaming and spamming, and the Zanzibarians claimed a victory for themselves. However, in the late spring of '06, the Floodians won, as the Zanzibar forum was deleted to make room for the Halo 3 forum, merging with New Mombasa.
bacon greese1521 created The Flood night bar. It is important in that is laid the template down for what every following forum bar. The first few posts are the ordering of drinks, with the OP serving as a bartender. Within a few pages, however, the bar quickly devolves into barfights, card games, and shenanigans of every kind. Flood Bars of this template are now opened on every holiday(that extols drinking) from January 1rst to December 31st.
A spammer named Watermelon King created at least 15 pages of nothing but "Shishka is a Pegboy" as the title and body of each thread. It is believed that it was because Shiska had called him a Pegboy, and that he did not take very kindly to this comment. At this point in Bungie.net's history, there was not post limit or cooldown; so he was able to create that many threads fairly quickly. Floodians, including Shiska, look back and laugh at the event.
Twitch did a whole bunch of spamming, trolling, flaming, and beyond, but he was still a major part of the community, and had himself a fanbase. The fanbase would eventually coin the phrase "Twitch for pres." He felt that the "spam was tha -blam!-," and that "it just need to be said." If he hadn't said it he "would be doing the world a disservice fo real." He would also target a group run by Gold Templar II. He was a character that Twitch found odd so naturally he "-blam!- with him... alot." His fan group launched a spam attack on his group, while Twitch created an alt that looked very similar to Gold Templer ll, and would spam the forums. Gold Templar told the mods that he had been hacked by Twitch, and that was all they needed. He has since been permabanned, but it is rumored he still posts on alts, like almost everyone does. People don't like to talk about Twitch for fear of it still upsetting moderators.
Still an active member, VII Toast was once a moderator. It was when he was a moderator that he got into trouble with other members of The Flood for allegedly deleting their posts and banning them for no reason. Eventually members started to respond to him in threads about the deleting of their posts, and began to complain to other moderators about his response. Not long after this, he was no longer a moderator. No questions were asked about the incident because everyone knew what had happened, and what brought on the change.
Although Floodians had defeated Zanzibar, the wars for supremacy were not over. The attention of the forum shortly turned to a new rival: The Halo 3 forum. As soon as the forum was released, the H3 Fanboys ignorantly started to spam the Flood with their theories and ideas for H3. In response, the Floodians flamed these members who spammed. The Fanboys retreated and started to stop spamming in October, but started back up again in November . This time, Floodians started to spam the H3 Forum with very stupid ideas, to see how the fanboys would act in response. The battles have halted since November, although contempt is still held by The Flood for The Halo 3 forum, and their regulars.
A thread in late summer reported that the moderators created a thread in HCFS, it was titled "We will attack at dawnleave no Floodian standing." However, the contents of the thread is unknown, because any non-moderator b.net member who even attempts to join the group will be in some pretty big trouble, or so says the group's motto. Anyway, the Floodians decided to be prepared for an attack from the mods(For mods, forum attacking is the act of locking threads for no apparent reason). Unfortunately, the next day, the thread was locked by a moderator. It is unknown if the moderators really were planning a surprise attack, but stopped because some bold Floodians found out, or if they are still planning for a surprise attack on The Flood to this day.
Don't let the title fool you, these two aren't married, even tough it says in her signature that they were on 12/22/2006. They didn't actually talk online until 8/31/2006, and didn't visit each other until 7/13/2007. They do still have a relationship to this day, and do plan on getting married when the time is right. They are pretty much the only Floodians to form a romantic relationship, and for it to then succeed after they met in real life. The only ones to do the former even, I think. That said, not every member was happy for them when they were still dating an getting married and having babies and growing old. In fact, quite a few Floodians got damned tired of hearing all about their lives, and how awesome they were, and how great a photographer gu3do was, and how pretty hotpink was. It wasn't that hotpink only wanted to write threads that were gushy blogs about how happy she was, she openly admitted that every thread she made simply became a blog out of habit. Eventually they both stated posting in groups more often so that members and moderators wouldn't get mad that they were posting lovey dubby blogs all the time.
There was a poll made about who should become the queen of The Flood. The winner of the poll was Jannelle4Now. It turned out that Jannelle4Now was actually an alternate account of the male member "L8teRunner (or something like that)." Cortana 5 was named Princess of The Flood as the runner up of the election, and with Jannelle/L8te forced to step down on account of not being the necessary amount of female required to be a queen, she took over as Queen of The Flood. Cortana 5 holds onto that title to this day.
A Floodian asked the Flood to help vote in a contest to win a kitchen makeover for his relatives. Huge amounts of Floodians poured in to vote, and it quickly took 2nd or 3rd after a few hours. Soon after that it took first place by over 200 votes. The kitchen became known as Kitchen 8 as it was initially the 8th choice. Kitchen 8 had become a massive phenomenon, with Floodians making groups to worship Kitchen 8 as a national religion. Kitchen 8 was now the Flood's official kitchen. However, some people were against it. On the contest's comment page, other people voting claimed that The Flood was made up of "hackers" and "12 year olds with no lives." One member set up a group to go against Kitchen 8, and support kitchen 7 (the then 2nd place kitchen). However, the group was a failure, recruiting only 6 members. The contest closed on January 31st, and as of Feb. 3rd, Kitchen 8 had officially won the contest.
The New Flood was founded by I Will Kill You based on the belief that The Flood and the entirety of the Bungie.net community had been degrading since the release of Halo 3. Many of the Flood's regulars joined the group for at least some point of time. The group had a constantly shifting administration structure, with administrators leaving, stepping down, or becoming deceased, and new ones taking over. On July 19, 2008, X Rampancy X, a New Flood member, created an offsite for the group. The Bungie.net group is now considered dead, as most members, and thus many former Floodians, have moved to the offsite. Through the first half of August of 2008, there was a panic about an attack on the forum. They rumors were "spread by Houston Texan." These rumors spread like wild fire through members on the Bungie.net forums. On August 14th, due to the countless warning threads, the phrase "New Flood" became a bannable term on the Bungie.net forums.
Jetfalcon was a selfproclaimed cool kid at school, but it hadn't always been that way for him. It was only over the last year that he had become popular, and become a shoe in to win Prom King. He was very loud about this, animal cruelty, most people saw him as an annoying douche. Among the most avid of his attackers were Ada Astra and MeechVII. Though this is not to say that everyone hated him, some actually saw him as a member who could be funny at times. Things came to a head when Floodians made YTMD's proclaiming his faults. Jetfalcon found out about this because he used Google.com to search his own name. Once he discovered it, he posted on The Flood about how it was a cyber hate crime because attacking a wealthy, popular, prom king is a hate crime. The Flood responded by flaming him, leading to the banning of many members once evilcam showed up to shut it down.
A group of Floodians decided to make a team for the Red Bull Flugtag with a ghost built over a bicycle. However, they weren't automatically selected, and instead were put in the wild-card round where they would have to be voted in. Unwilling to let this go down to chance, the Floodians called on the forums to go to the site and vote them in. The response was overwhelming, with The Ghost Bike team getting nearly 30,000 votes. The Ghost Bike team took the stage on the 23rd of June, and did a Halo based skit when they prepared to launch. The Ghost Bike when speeding off the platform and did a nosedive straight into the water.
On a day in the summer of 2007, Pillage, or an alt of his posted how he had been able to hack into Gamerz Property's/Gamer girl's account by fishing her information. Logical Thinking is also thought to be involved with the hacking. They successfully got her myspace, Bungie.net account, and photobucket account. They were able to get a large amount of personal information from this, and posted some things that Gamerz didn't want anyone to see. Not every member saw Gamerz as the victim in the situation, or at least not a pitiable one. For the, her blogs about her extracurricular activities with friends meant that she warranted the invasion of property. The Flood devolved into people supporting Pillage's actions for whatever inane reason they used to justify it, no one saying anything if they were one Gamerz' side, and Gamerz freaking the -blam!- out about the whole thing.
An unknown hacked into the moderator's, Pezza's, account started locking all threads on the front page of The Flood. All hell broke loose. Several people who started threads about the incident were blacklisted. A few of those blacklisted were some of the Flood's well-known users. In fact, even moderators were being banned. People were making threads asking for their thread to be pinned, some of which ended up being pinned, but were quickly taken down. About 10 or so minutes later, the chaos finally stopped, as administrators and higher ranking forum ninjas blacklisted the moderator's account. Many formerly pinned threads had been deleted, and so new ones were created. Pezza now uses a different account, Pezz.
A family posted a video of their Christmas Tree on the website, and allowed for you to comment in the chat and control the way the lights on the tree changed colors. If someone in the family was by the computer when you were commenting they would put up a whiteboard with what you wrote in front of the camera. It was a sensation the first year, but only lasted a few days. The second year it was brought up by another member, and it was just as popular, and lasted far longer, going all the way past Christmas Day. The last post was Foman thanking the Schwippy family for their participation with The Flood.
A thread was created by bungie employee drabominable, titled DO YOU LIKE PIE? For quite some time it was extremely popular. The thread was more than simple yes and now answers, with some members writing massive philosophical arguments as to why pie was such a wonderful food, and vice versa. Multiple moderators also partook in the discussion, giving the thread validity. However, after 2009, it came under scrutiny as breaking the rules that all other members had to abide by. The topic of whether or not the thread should be locked quickly became a massive and long lasting topic all unto itself with debate raging in both The Flood and The Septagon. At last, the thread was deleted, as was the main discussion thread about whether or not to lock it. This decision did not please many Floodians, who saw it as just further evidence of The Septagon interfering with The Floods good times.
For quite some time it was only the dumb forum games that were considered spam, but a shift in policy would occur. Serious discussions about this did not happen until much later, with members questioning the reasoning for the change in policy in 2009.
Created by DoJoe89, The Flood V2 is made up of members that claim to be devil spawn. The group was much more aggressive than the New Flood, and was proud of it. They often spammed, trolled and raided The Flood. They would edit pages on Bungiepedia, to a point where it quickly got far out of hand. On November 15th of 2008, The Flood V2 would create an offsite, and it would then fail on the 21rst. A second offsite of The Flood was created by Tom. Most of the group has either moved to the offsite, or at least participates in it in some way. However, the group does not raid The Flood as much, if at all anymore as moderation has stepped up since the implementation of the Play Nice Rules. The Last major event was a group attack in February of 2009.
On this day at approximately 8:45 The Flood reached 7777 pages of content
Probably the most important rule change, or revamped enforcement in Flood history. The play nice rules drastically effected the culture of The Flood culture. It is seen as both the moment that the administration finally began to crack down on misbehaving Floodians, and as a motion to make The Flood conform by an oppressive administration. Many members felt that the rules went to far, leading to a increase in membership for Flood V2, and other groups of it's ilk. The New Flood and Flood V2 are both often included in the discussion as to why the Play Nice rules were enacted. This is supported by some members of the groups, as well Achronos' statement that the problem mostly seemed "to be due to a specific subculture of those that frequent this forum." However, members of the group will say that it was specifically The Flood's culture that lead to the rules, and the subculture was only being copied by The Flood.
On September 24th, a member reported how PETA had asked the Ben and Jerry's Ice cream company to use human breast milk instead of cow's milk. Floodians were appalled at the idea. Shortly afterward, a member found that PETA had an online site that include forums where the nuts talked about saving chickens from the evil Colonel Sanders. Floodians organized themselves and created accounts on the PETA boards to harass the members. However, the moderators couldn't allow this to continue happening once they found out. on January 2nd, 2009, Duardo issued a message on the issue. Any Floodian "proclaiming to have spammed the PETA website, or any other, will be permanently banned from Bungie.net without exception." The reasoning for this was on the interpretation that by spamming PETA's website you were hampering their use of the Bungie.net website. Spamming has openly stopped since this announcement.
Hancock was a popular member, who gained popularity after he announced that he had been diagnosed with "Perihilar cholangiocarcinoma" on September 28th of 2008. He explained that by the time it had been diagnosed, it had "metastasized, spread to the rest of his liver and small intestine," so it was now inoperable. Most members believed what he said, and shared their condolences with him, though there were some doubters. Most expressed their disbelief that if he truly had been diagnosed with cancer, then why was he spending time on an internet forum? Hancock posted no specific date of death, but did say that he had less than a year to live Hancock posted an update on March 17, 2009. He explained that he had undergone surgery in October which had removed many affected organs. He talked about how he gone to Greece and seen the world. His post was notably more depressed, and how he was looking forward to death at this point. His last post was on 4/22/2009, but that does not mean for many members that he is dead. Some have questioned his threads as simply very clever trolling, and said that he had simply stopped using that account, and switched to using an alternate. Using an alt is such a common practice when someone is banned, that it is not unlikely.
A Floodian by the name of Knightmare01 petitioned the Flood to go draw on the Draw-ball. Floodians flooded in to flood draw-ball with the colors of The Flood. This would continue for months, with multiple invasions planned by The Flood in private groups and The Flood forum. Floodians saw it as a way to compete with /b/ and 4chan in general without actually attacking or provoking their website. As with the PETA incident, however, moderators couldn't have The Flood using sites where you draw in coordinated ways. On 4/7/2009 the thread was locked, though many members had started to grow tired of all the draw-ball threads.
The origin of "try xbox.com".
On this day, at around 6:40 PM The Flood reached 10,000 pages of content. The Flood has since passed 20,000 days of content.
It all started with a post talking about how a pet recently died on a members porch. From there Floodians created multiple parody threads. From there, Floodians created multiple parody threads of parody threads. From there, Floodians created parody threads, of parody threads, of parody threads. It spiraled wildly out of control, to the point that over 4 pages were covered with parody threads, all of which had something to do with a porch.
In the middle of a crisis of some sort, the Flood quickly organized itself into squadrons. From red wing to redrum, the Flood prepared to fight an enemy of some sort, for over 24 hours. Of course they never actually fought an enemy, they just reported in, and reported on the situation of each others toilets.
Founded by The Flood Sniper, The Flood School was initially a a thread with a great number of hyperlinks to other threads which claimed to have an educational purpose. Everything from Dance, to Philosophy to Martyrdom was taught at The Flood's New School. There was even a teachers lounge, though that department was still in need of more education professionals. In case you failed, there is always Flood Summer School.
An alternate, now identified as belonging to Pieman191, named Bronze created a thread titled "I'm issuing a treaty. The thread entailed characters proclaiming an element, and then forming alliances against the other elements. The action quickly escalated, with members creating alternate accounts in order to participate the fullest. It was no longer a member representing the element gold, but the member gold that engaged in the combat. The war lasted 4 hours until a moderator locked the thread.
Floodians have always been easily rallied up behind the cause of a popularity war behind specific members, and this case was no different. It started with HarlowOO197 attacking Chris Lyonz because he betrayed The Flood by supporting /b/ in a hypothetical war. He coupled this with declaring himself the emperor of The Flood. Harlow already had a group dedicated to himself called Harlow's Royal Guard which helped to spread and defend his empire. He would eventually expand into a second group. Meanwhile, Naked N00B 14 was constantly creating threads that either broke, or barely stayed within the rules of the forum. Most of his threads became hot topics and he quickly became a popular Floodian, know for his willingness to debate the issues of the day. He declared his bid for President of The World on October 12, 2009. Rhea on the other hand had been working the popularity game for over a year at this point. She is a chick, and talked about sex, and college, so she was instantly popular. The Flood is still part of the internet, after all. She had created a group Take Over Teh World in 9/29/2008. Multiple polls were created in order to accomodate the need of The Flood to discuss the topic. Eventually some of the candidates used alts to create polls that eliminated a candidate that did better than them. Ultimately HarlowOO197 stepped down as emperor, and Naked N00B 14 was banned because of the threads he made. Harlow eventually left HRG because he felt it had become too militant, and started another group, Sapphire, in hope that it would be more laid back. In most cases this would make Rhea the winner. However, during the campaign Naked Noob had called her a man, and the insult stuck, as well as the title of "The Flood's Attention Whore" by Elite Mouse. Floodians have since jumped on the bandwagon, and she was never able to claim victory.
Porch Day 2 was started when a thread was created asking what porch day was. Other members took this as a call to make tons of threads about porches. Some talked about how porches were needed to fend of alien invasions, or "PORCHES!" Once again, people seemed to be worried about spam.
On this day many members created specifically Pokemon named accounts and started posting on the forums. However, almost all of these accounts have been since banned, so the only evidence that it happened are large numbers of Pokemon related threads that have hardly any posts in them at all, all of which occurred on a specific date, and the testimony of Floodians.
Rampant Tragedy created a thread asking if he should help someone. Not help someone as in terms of whether or not to carry her groceries, but whether or not he should get help to prevent her from committing suicide. The Flood responded with an overwhelming response asking Rampant Tragedy to try and help his bipolar friend. The Flood can do good work, when it is pushed in the right direction.
Starting with a thread asking how people are injured with a grenade, members took it as a stupid questions and began making parody threads. Multiple how to questions covered a couple pages of The Flood forum.
A member (whose name, due to the .Nextopocalypse has been lost) created a thread about how the members of the Flood needed to invade Antarctica and prevent the Militant Penguins, led by infamous troll Cleopatra, from taking over the continent. The entire original thread was devoted to what species and people would help the cause, leading to multiple pages of preparation and training needed to win over the penguins. These preparations then led to a thread made by Comrade Napoleon where the battle officially began. At launch hour, airborne units dropped in on the Palmer Land peninsula and encountered heavy fighting, while naval units provided support and launched the amphibious beach assault from the Weddell Sea. After intense inch-by-inch fighting, the Flood Coalition pushed to the South Pole, stopped Cleopatra from using nuclear weapons, and successfully wiped out the Penguin forces. Joyous celebrations were had, and the names of all the fighters went down in history as war heroes.
The idea was simple, for The Flood to make a plan to invade Bungie studios. At a rate of about 10 pages of posts every hour, the idea gained massive interest from Floodians. The Flood came up with many plans of attack, and strategies to get through the "positronic energy shields" that surround Bungie studios, and who was going to bring the snacks. The targets of the raid included Ling Ling's head and Sergeant Johnson. The Flood was never able to materialize the plan of attack, and eventually the thread was locked.
On this day, around 7:35 PM The Flood reached 20,000 pages of content. The Flood had also reached over 500,000 topics by this point.
We'd love to hear from you. Please send questions or feedback to the below email addresses.
Before contacting us, you may wish to visit our FAQs page which has lots of useful info on Tiki-Toki.
We can be contacted by email at: hello@tiki-toki.com.
You can also follow us on twitter at twitter.com/tiki_toki.
If you are having any problems with Tiki-Toki, please contact us as at: help@tiki-toki.com
Close